No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

(Enter, Stage Right, John Cleese)

:D

This problem goes back beyond the time of the crusades, don't expect an easy solution - if we ever get a solution at all.

The practised muslim faith is the fastest growing in the world, while practised christianity is in decline. I don't know why that is, but it is an issue we have to deal with.
It is also a supra-national issue that is manifesting itself around the world - not in one country - you cannot fight half the world.

However long the physical fight might take, ultimately it always comes down to a usually unsavoury diplomatic comprise eventually, always, without exception, throughout modern history.

It needs a dispassionate approach that considers all options from the tip of a bayonet, to positive engagement at a socio-religous level. My personal view is that both are needed - but should be applied with measured consideration.
Extreme polarisation around left or right wing views is not going to answer this one....

Originally Posted by Biped

Anakey and Goon: Will you please answer the question?

Where does most of the religious intolerence and violence stem from in the WORLD today?

Religious intolerance:

Depends what you mean. Do you mean those who won't let persons lawfully and quietly worship their God in peace? If so, I'd say sections of the white European and U.S. right, who really hate Muslims, and may go on about it on internet message boards.

Violence:

The US, British and Israeli militaries, without a doubt. In terms of lives lost, maimings and damage to property they win hands down.

Any more questions?

Originally Posted by annakey

Originally Posted by The_Goon

Don't use the racism remark - Islam is not race, it's a religion.

What you want to say is "bigotry". ;)

It's also a culture. So:

1. To criticise someone on grounds of race - probably illegal, certainly un-PC.

2. To criticise someone on grounds of religion - legal (just), OK if they're white, Christian, rich, Yankee or (in particular) Tom Cruise.

3. To criticise someone on grounds of culture - legal. Un-PC and some people get hot under collar when one culture is claimed as superior to another (I do it all the time - a democratic culture is superior imv to a dictatorship).

Confusing isn't it?

Haven't read the whole thread yet, but may I venture 'ethnocentric'?
;)

If you've ever read a thread involving The_Cad, Bugly and Biped, then you've read this one. ;)

Annakey, that was ill-advised - incoming, I'm sure.

Originally Posted by in_the_cheapseats

Biped

What is your definition of a liberal? Yours seems a mite Fox Channel for my liking where it is used as a term of abuse.

One I found that I was happy with:

"a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties"

Where does it say in that that I'm sitting back waiting to be rolled over by your deviant hordes?

I am tolerant of change yes, but within the framework of secularism, the rule of law and the democratic process. The rules are there to be used but they aren't being applied, for all the wrong reasons, the primary one being an incorrect fear of appearing intolerant to Muslim.

Well that's very laudable, don't get me wrong. It's a very comfy jumper, with patches on the arms (to prevent wear and tear of course) and sits very well on the body whilst one pontificates the values of liberalism and a value-based society that gives freedoms of thought and action to other stakeholders within a society irrespective of whether they, as a group, plan to change the system through either subversion or force into one that prevents the very civil liberties you espouse.

When the attitudes of a good proportion of the people about which we speak are bent on the violent overthrow or destruction through terrorism, dirty bombs and chemical weapons, aimed principaly at civilian populations, and this has been proven by such attacks across the globe (too numerous to count), this becomes a very DANGEROUS stance to take.

Many muslims around the world are not in the least bit interested in secularism. Secularism is for the stupid, the weak, the irreligious and the infidel. Secularism and the rule of law goes against everything they stand for, unless the rule of law is Sharia in origin and backed up by Mullahs.

Talking about liberal secular values and laws is all well and good in a liberal, secular country like the UK, but the direction of the threat comes not from such people, it comes from hardline religious fundamentalists the world over who all follow one particular religion and who couldn't give a flying fcuk about comfy sweaters.

Cosy chats won't make them drop their fundamentalist attitudes or the attacks against other people around the world. Direct action, denouncement, infiltration, covert and overt surveillance, and public challenges to their ideology and beliefs are some of the many approaches that can be taken. There is nothing wrong with questioning the mentality or such people, or the religion that breeds the mentality.

Engagement of this religion has done nothing to stop their fundamentalists and the subsequent attacks.

You speak of bigotry and racism and intolerence, but this is a drop in the ocean when compared to dirty bombs, suicide attacks, plane crashes, jihad, terrorism and more, across the globe.

I pity the people who are so offended by mere, so-called bigotted words, and yet seek to defend a religion that breeds a far worse intolerence that often leads to terrorism and deaths on a monumental scale.

Once again we are lurching off-topic to address the tedious 'All Muslims are bad' agenda of the site Nazis. Let's either get back on thread or knock it on the head please.

Originally Posted by Biped

how do you propose we (and I mean the whole none-muslim world when I say this) deal with the threat to life and limb that Islam (as a whole) poses to everyone else.

Honestly? I don't know. Do you? Pessimistically, I think we're already on a downward spiral into a war against the wider Islamic world, which will last far longer than Dannett's 'generation'. If there's a way out of this, it's strengthening the non-Islamist majority within Islam against its hijackers. But lashing out indiscriminately is the worst thing we can do right now.

Many peasants in Soviet Russia were not Marxist/Leninist as you kindly point out, but it didn't stop Marxism/Leninism as an ideology being a threat to the world as we knew it from nuclear destruction

I know. And radical Islam, as well as the population explosion in the Muslim world, presents a grave threat to our society/civilisation. But, using the above analogy, it would have been better for us to have dragged out the intervention in the Russian Civil War than faced them in Germany in the '80s (say) when the radicals had long since won the civil war and become immovable from power. As said, Islam's fighting a civil war- both literally and spiritually. We need to back the right side, and stick to it, not lump them both together and fight a complex, pointless war on an ever-increasing number of fronts.

Islamists have the material backing of a number of countries, like Iran to name but one. Iran is seeking nuclear weapons (and please, please don't tell me they aren't), whilst Saudi Arabia is the home of one of the most right wing, fundamentalist Islamic regimes in existance today, Wahabism

Within 5 years, we'll be fighting Iran, IMO, and Pakistan too. Within 10/15 Saudi as well. I actually think the best thing we could do right now is pull out of Iraq- the Spams too- and let the Saudis and Iranians fight each other for it, whether by proxy or in reality. Fcuk'em both. No amount of oil's worth the mess we're sinking into, and an Iran that's bleeding men and money into fighting a bewildering assortment of tribes, nationalists, and its own Arab minority will be far less of a threat to us.

(and yes, I know this is a really sh1tty option for the ordinary Iraqis. I don't know how to begin solving that one)


annakey wrote:

There's always been a 'stupid wing' of the British right, which believes anyone who uses the old grey matter is a dangerous pinko, probably on drugs, who wants compulsory sociology classes for all

True, but there's always been an intellectual, libertarian right- to which I flatter myself I belong :D - as well, which was well-represented within the Army even in supposedly Blimpish days. Think of all our Arabist colonels and int officers of the '20s/'30s/'40s...

Originally Posted by Nehustan

but may I venture 'ethnocentric'?

;)

Bloody hell Nehustan, you always do this, use words I have to look up

Originally Posted by Rumpelstiltskin

True, but there's always been an intellectual, libertarian right- to which I flatter myself I belong :D - as well, which was well-represented within the Army even in supposedly Blimpish days. Think of all our Arabist colonels and int officers of the '20s/'30s/'40s...

Couldn't agree more. I've a former Sandhurst lecturer in the family. The Thatcher revolution couldn't have happened without them. Places like the Chicago Business School are stuffed with 'em.

Which makes the anti-intellectual British right even more silly: their own political movement contains some of the best brains of the age, their ideology underpining the movement's thinking.

‘Understand a little less, condemn a little more’ LOL


Edited to add: the recent drugs thread - http://www.arrse.co.uk/cpgn2/Forums/...ght=drugs.html - illustrated the split on the right precisely, with clever right wing libertarians arguing for sanity, and the dinosaur-right effectively supporting gangsterism. The same split torments Cameron’s Conservative Party, with virtual civil war taking place LOL